Chang, who goes by "Sam," was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of Chinese parents who survived the World War II Japanese occupation of China and later emigrated to the United States. Chang has received fellowships from Stanford University (the Stegner Fellowship) and Princeton University. She has most recently served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer of Creative Writing at Harvard University. Chang received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University. At Yale, she served as managing editor of the Yale Daily News, and at Harvard, she received a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Chang is currently Professor of English at the University of Iowa and Director of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop; she is the first female and Asian American writer to serve as director of the Workshop. She also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In 2008 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The five stories in Hunger (1998) deal mainly with the position of Chinese in America, though the last of them is set in pre-Communist Shanghai. Inheritance (2004) is the story of a wealthy but declining family in Republican China, beginning in 1925 and extending through the period of the Japanese invasion and the post-war flight to Taiwan and then the USA.